Who’s Responsible for What AI Says About Your Brand?

So tell us about the overlap between the external and internal signals.

What does that look like?

Well, so it's really kind of a continuum.

AI in and of itself, it doesn't just...

it doesn't try to fill in the gaps naturally on its own.

So if you give it incomplete or inaccurate data or incomplete or accurate content, it's the same processing.

It's just happening for a different purpose, right? So AI is going to, it will just make up things to fill in the gaps sometimes if you don't have a proper governance process in place to manage how it's doing it.

So for the internal, you know, do you have clean data feeding it in the first place? So a lot of folks I talk to, they end up with a CRM issue going on where it the AI is actually pulling from the CRM, but it's maybe pulling inaccurate data and complete data, dirty data, whatever, a lot of duplicates, and it's thinking you have more opportunities than you do.

And then it's summarizing all that very confidently into an output report that people are making decisions on without having all the time having some person actually analyze the results and confirm that it used the right data from the right system and that the conclusions it's pushing are actually accurate externally the systems are actually able to see all the content you have on your website but there's also oftentimes an ability for those external systems to see documents you don't realize they see they could be looking at pdfs they might be looking at a sales presentation that somehow made its way to ai a lot of people integrated into slack and email and things like that and that actually can potentially affect your external visibility too And I know a lot of people don't really talk about this, but it's a real concern when you start looking at the continuum, the internal and the external.

So it really becomes a top-down issue when you're talking about it this way.

It's not just, hey, let's hand the SEO people a project to go and AEL the site, right? And you can do that.

But it's really about, as an organization, do you position yourself the same way across functions, right? Does your RevOps say the same thing as sales? Do they say the same as marketing? And then do the third-party platforms that are so important for GEO, do they say the same thing? You've got to have alignment now all the way across.

And it's really a much bigger problem than sort of the tactical approach we've seen a lot of people take in the last year or so.

I'm actually really glad that you brought up the sales piece, like the sales presentation that's made its way to AI.

A couple of weeks ago, I had David Kirkdorfer on, and he was talking about, you know, sometimes the sales team tweaks the language to whoever they're talking to, so it makes it easier for them to understand.

But if you do that enough, you really change the positioning, and you don't realize it across the department is what you've done.

Right.

And now imagine your external AI systems get a hold of that, and they've got convoluted messaging.

So they're making promises that you actually can't fulfill.

And then the rest of your sales team is sitting around unraveling the yarn before they can actually sell.

It's an efficiency problem that's creating.

You

can't customize everything for everyone.

Right.